Abstract
Preschool children and adults were compared in two experiments examining the basic issue of whether perceptual representations of objects are built-up from independent features along the dimensions of size and brightness. Experiment 1 was a visual search experiment. Subjects searched for targets which differed from distractors either by a single feature or by a conjunction of features. Results from preschoolers were comparable to those from adults, and were consistent with Treisman and Gelade's (1980, Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97–136) feature-integration theory of attention. Their theory states that independent features are encoded in parallel and are later combined with a spatial attention mechanism. However, children's significantly steeper conjunctive search slope indicated a slower speed of feature integration. In Experiment 2, four mathematical models of pattern recognition were tested against classification task data. The findings from both age groups were again consistent with a model assuming that size and brightness features are initially registered, and then integrated. Moreover, the data from Experiment 2 imply that perceptual growth entails small changes in the discriminability of featural representations; however, both experiments show that the operations performed on these representations are the same developmentally.
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